The Midas touch?

October 13, 2008|By Los Angeles Times

The first of the "Google phones" is controlled using a method that is finally gaining momentum in mobile computing: swiping a finger across the screen.

The touch sensors in T-Mobile's G1 phone, which hits the market Oct. 23, are made by Synaptics, a little-known but influential Silicon Valley company co-founded in 1986 by a professor and a microprocessor engineer.

For the two decades since, Synaptics has championed the finger as a navigation tool for computers. It develops many of the sensors behind laptop touch pads, digital media players and high-end remote controls.

But touch screens were rarely seen in cell phones until Apple's iPhone hit the market in June 2007.

The iPhone lets users scroll through pages of text or photos and type on an on-screen keyboard with one finger, or expand or shrink files with two fingers.

Analysts who have taken apart the iPhone say they don't believe that the Synaptics technology powers the innovative touch screen. Apple and Synaptics won't say. But the device's growing popularity helped Synaptics' mission of bringing touch screens to the mainstream.

Over the past six months, the company has launched four phones with its touch-screen technology. And another one is coming soon: The G1, which is made by HTC and runs Google's Android operating system.

Putting touch technology on cell phones wasn't embraced at first. That has all changed, said Andrew Hsu, a product marketing manager at the company.

"Now we don't have to go to customers and say, 'You want to do this,'" he said.

In 2006, a year before the iPhone was unveiled, Synaptics demonstrated a concept phone called the Onyx, a remote-control-looking device navigated by the fingertip. In January 2007, the LG Prada, with Synaptics technology, became the first touch-screen cell phone to reach the market, but it didn't catch on the way the iPhone did six months later.

In 2007, when Google encouraged companies to join the Open Handset Alliance to develop a new cell phone software platform, Synaptics signed up. Hsu said cell phones with touch screens become more useful if the software takes advantage of the technology.

"The Google people understood the software side and worked on applications from the get-go, rather than bolt things on the last second," he said.

The G1 and Android-powered phones from other manufacturers are aiming for the same smart-phone consumer market dominated by Research in Motion's BlackBerry and iPhone. Besides the touch screen, the G1 also is controlled by a track ball and a keyboard.

It's unclear how the new touch-screen cell phones will sell.

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It's a cell world after all

The number of cell phones with touch screens is expected to nearly triple by 2010, to 362 million from 120 million in 2007, according to research firm iSuppli. In comparison, cell phones without touch screens are expected to increase by